If you don't mind me asking, how'd the Deck change your thinking on the Switch 2?
This will sound dumb, but I bought
Outer Wilds for my Steam Deck, and realized how much port begging that I, personally, saw evaporate when I had another handheld to play games on. I also realized that even though the OLED SD fixed every major issue I had with the Steam Deck, there were still games I would prefer to play on Switch.
The conventional wisdom is that Nintendo doesn't need to seriously consider the Portable PC in its calculus, because those machines are still sub 5 million in sales. I now disagree, in a way that surprises me. Valve has made as close to a "console like" experience on a PC as possible, and it's great, but it still took me an hour to get
Control where I wanted it. I don't think it's possible to smooth that experience down without eliminating everything special that the Steam Deck brings to the table.
That leaves a number of places where Nintendo can lean into what makes
their device special, above and beyond "gaming handheld." Nintendo doesn't need to offer best-in-class performance to make me prefer playing on their device. Ergonomics, portability, battery life, ease of docking, zero config required, and yes
gimmicks are the things that will draw me in.
When it comes to the specific technology, being able to play with some next-gen games on a handheld device, with PC like control over them I've got the following conclusions.
RT is the secret sauce. It's really amazing to see what RT can do to the visual look of a game that has been art-designed around it. Folk worry about how a system that can't match the Series S in TFLOPS is going to age. I am now, more than ever, worried about how well the Series S can age without better RT performance.
DLSS 2 isn't the secret sauce. I'm not saying DLSS 2 is bad - it's
amazing. But I'm surprised at how well other upscalers hold up at 2x scaling, on a smaller screen or at a long distance. And they are
fast. All upscaling can have interesting interactions with post-processing effects. I've always been kinda dubious of thinking of DLSS as some kinda "FLOP multiplier" but this nipped it in the bud. It's an amazing tool that the other consoles don't have, but what is the "best" upscaling solution is a game-by-game decision.
Fast Storage Matters. A little. The NVMe in the Steam Deck is great, lots of very fast loading times. But in terms of
gameplay I've never seen it under serious strain. It's hard to tell how games will evolve over the next 7 years, but I suspect that games which depend on ultra-fast storage for gameplay will be bottlenecked by GPU/CPU performance on a theoretical Switch 2.
FDE matters a lot. Even loading doesn't stress the SSD as much as I'd expect, but that little 4 core CPU cluster gets slammed. That integration of fast read speeds with specialized decompression hardware is what is going to give the bang for buck more than just pushing the SSD speeds through the roof
Gimme 16 GB of RAM plz. I've been on the "12GB is
fine" train for sometime, but the SD convinced me that 16GB would be a real win. Being able to push texture setting to max every where is such a relief, and we're starting to see RT heavy titles really need lots of system RAM as well as GPU RAM.
40hz is better than you think and probably not worth it? 40fps is incredible. It's such a massive leap in how games feel over 30fps. I never use it, because there are few games that can get to 40fps without excessive visual sacrifices over 30fps. And that's me tweaking every setting. Consider the many TVs don't have 40hz support - I expect very few games to support a 40fps mode even if the built in screen supports it, so it's my favorite thing that I think Nintendo shouldn't spend a penny on.
Ergonomics matter. Which is not to say that the Switch or the Steam Deck get it perfect. I miss the SD sticks every time I go back to the Switch. And I hate how close all the buttons are on my Switch, there are games where I wind up controlling the stick with my palm because everything is so cramped. But every time I go back to the Switch my wrists breath a sigh of relief. I love the lack of hot air blowing in my face. The SD OLED improves fan noise a lot but my Switch is silent. I love that I can get custom grips by replacing my Joy-Con. The Switch is more portable, and I can stick it random places without worry about it getting knocked over by nieces.
Make it easier to pick up Nintendo. Do you know how much my Switch screen gets smudged? Not only is there no real place to grip an attached Joy-Con that doesn't make it feel like I'm going to pop off one of the tiny sticks, but the Joy-Con rails are fragile. I've owned multiple Switches and even more Joy-Con and I always wind up in a situation where one of the Joy-Con starts disconnecting during play, because the rail stops connecting snuggly. I'm afraid to apply more stress to the connection, so I pick up the Switch by the tablet. Which means it is smudged all to fuck and back.
www.micron.com
YAAS BITCH! MAKE THOSE PREDICTIONS! GIVE EM YOUR ESTIMATIONS, GURRRLL!!
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. So now I have these random screenshots in my folder 
